P.C. - The New Tyranny

Phil Brennan

Dec. 26, 2000

As we stand on the brink of a new century many of us are preoccupied with
righting the wrongs of eight years of liberal mischief. Some of those around the
president-elect are talking about keeping a close eye the spate of last-minute executive
mandates pouring out of the White House with an eye toward reversing the more outrageous
ones.

Others wisely observe that the whole range of executive orders and other examples of
Clinton's misuse of presidential powers be carefully scrutinized and reversed when
appropriate. And there are others in the president-elect's entourage who suggest that the
criminality that marked the Clinton years be carefully investigated and that indictments
be sought whenever possible, letting the chips fall where they may.

All this is well and good, and I hope that President Bush will follow through and act
on these suggestions. The Augean stables are in desperate need of a thorough cleaning if
Mr. Bush is to make good on his pre-election promise to restore honesty and dignity to a
White House dragged through the Clintonesque slime for eight long years.

But there's more to be done - and most of it is going to have to be done by us - you
and me and everybody else concerned about the future of this republic.

We are locked in the clutches of the tyranny known as political correctness - a tyranny
that has been allowed to flourish on the campuses of our institutions of higher learning
and has now worked it way all the way down to kindergarten level and out into the whole of
society.

Everybody's familiar with examples of this stupid attempt to mold our youth - and
everybody else - into platoons of goose-stepping automatons who'll forever respond like
Pavlov's dogs to the commands of the Marxist elite who dominate our culture.

In a recent column George Will wrote of the 12-year-old girl arrested and cuffed and
hauled off to the slammer by Washington's finest for the heinous crime of eating French
fries on the subway, the four little schoolboys suspended for having had a shootout using
their fingers as imagnary pistols, and the countless kids booted out of school for having
nail clippers, an aspirin or a pair of scissors.

On a higher level there is the recent case of a highly respected scholar and scientist
viciously slandered by his fellow faculty members and fired by his university for daring
to suggest that the laws of physics might well show that the emergence of universe wasn't
an accident at all, but the work of some higher intelligence.

Imagine, suggesting that the idea that the universe created itself is wrong! What could
the man be thinking?

Such examples of a culture gone bonkers are legion, and some of them are so bizarre as
to border on the humorous. But they are anything but funny.

These examples of absurdity abound and what they reveal is the presence of a growing
tendency among the cultural elite to impose a dictatorship over the minds of the American
people by laying down a secular theology that defines what is acceptable and condemns what
their enlightened apostasy's creed declares is not.

Political correctness has always been a tool of tyranny - in ancient Rome it was
employed as a weapon against the growth of Christianity - it was politically incorrect to
worship Jesus and not the emperor as God, for example. In France failure to embrace the
murderous doctrines of the revolution got you a trip to the guillotine, and in Germany
rejection of the tenets of the Nationalist Socialist Worker's Party was a one-way ticket
to the gas chambers.

In Soviet Russia just about anything that contradicted Marxist-Leninism brought the
jack-booted thugs to your doorstep, just as it does today in the Chinese socialist
worker's paradise.

Make no mistake about it - P.C. is nothing short of an insidious weapon designed to
brainwash the American people, and to cast into the outer darkness all those who refuse to
submit to its absurdities.

Among the more current doctrines being imposed from above are such obvious absurdities
that fly in the face of reason itself as the notion that there is no difference between
men and women or the roles nature decrees they should fulfill, that all forms of abnormal
sexuality are normal and should be promoted as equally healthy, that human beings are not
human while still in the womb and are therefor disposable at the whim and caprice of their
mothers, that a disarmed population has nothing to fear from a heavily armed government on
the make, that government has first call on the earnings of all citizens, or that free
speech is only free if the cultural elite says it is.

What to do about this long march into a homogenous society where everybody is the same
as everybody else in every respect and no exceptions are to be permitted?

I'll let Charlton Heston reply. In a speech delivered at Harvard University in February
1999, here's what he had to say about the tyranny of P.C.:

"In his book, The End of Sanity, Martin Gross writes that 'blatantly
irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human
endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories
regularly foisted on us from every direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans
know something, without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it
comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don't like it.'

"... What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has
evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can't be far behind. Before
you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness
originate on America's campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you,
who're supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression?

"Let's be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really
believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of
political correctness rules the halls of reason."

And here's what Heston suggested American people can do about this scourge:

"You simply ... disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently,
absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don't. We
disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom ... disavow cultural
correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous
law that weaken personal freedom."

If the corruption of PC has wormed its way into your local public schools, go after the
school board and get rid of the members who allow it. Run for the school board and dump
the teachers and administrators who promote it. Pressure local governments to abandon or
reject all attempts to impose P.C.

Light a cigarette, buy a gun, say "mankind" instead of "humankind,"
eat fattening foods, drink booze, and treat animals as if they were animals, insects as
insects, and trees as if they are trees and not a fellow species entitled to equal
treatment.

Be alert. Act. Be politically incorrect and save this republic from the clutches of a
bunch of politically correct idiots who ache to run your lives from cradle to grave.

Phil Brennan, who writes for
NewsMax.com, is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web ( http://www.pvbr.com ). He
is a veteran journalist, was Washington columnist for National Review in the 1960s and
served as a staff aide at the U.S. House Republican Policy Committee. His e-mail address
is pvb@pvbr.com.